How the Pope became popular among Evangelicals

The title alone seems like a crazy thought; it least it would have only a generation or two ago.  Having just finished Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (with its 1016 pages no less), I could not help but comment on his observation that Secularism (in particular cultural battles over sexual morality) was an unintentional boost to the modern alliance between formerly rival factions within Christianity.  A generation or two ago, the primary threat as seen by Evangelical Protestants would have been Liberal Protestantism and Catholicism; Orthodox Christianity wouldn't have rated a mention as it languished behind the Iron Curtain.  Fast forward past the Cultural Revolution of the 60's, Roe vs. Wade, the rising tide of divorce in the West and America, and the battles for ordination for women and homosexuals.  With all of these struggles in common, a remarkable shift has taken place: "a survey on approval ratings among American Evangelicals showed that Pope John Paul II, who would have represented Antichrist to an earlier Evangelical generation, out polled assorted spokesmen of the Religious Right" (pg. 1010, from a poll taken in 2004).
What did it take to make the Pope popular among Evangelicals?  The realization that we have more in common with our brothers and sisters in the Catholic (and Orthodox) Churches than we do with a society that has come to embrace sexual promiscuity, divorce, abortion, and euthanasia.  It was not a sudden outbreak of Christian brotherhood that prompted those looking across the divide of Christianity for solidarity, but a realization that we must work together lest we separately be overwhelmed by atheism and agnosticism.  It seems that after 500 years of confrontation (in the case of Orthodoxy, 1000 years), the worldwide Church is beginning to see that the message of the Gospel is needed in our world regardless of which one of our Christian denominations is doing the telling.  What we have in common is more important that our differences, however important they may be.  The world needs a message of hope, forgiveness, and reconciliation, far more than it needs us to continue the arguments that have raged within the Church in the shadow of the writings of St. Augustine.
Did I once think the Pope would be the Antichrist?  Sure I did, that's what was being taught in Evangelical circles 30 years ago.  The times, they are a changing.  In the words of the American Patriot Benjamin Franklin, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."